Websites are not websites, they’re plants (vines are an even better analogy). Websites used to be apartments, either furnished (web-building software) or unfurnished, that you moved into, decorated, and often redecorated. Now, they’ve become organic ongoing enterprises that need to grow/change/respond with your visitors/customers/clients in mind. Vines.

I was speaking with the amenable Ben Kunz a little while back about the need for websites to finally break free from the 2-Dimensional design manacles of brochures and postcards. It could be that “apps” are the new sites, that sites themselves will be less about pages and more about functions. Maybe one one day my own site will be a button (a widget) that does something cool, something my clients need, something remarkable.

BUT…until we all get to the near-future we need to fix the here and now. We need to stop thinking of sites in 2-D, we need to model them in X-D! The X is for the non-linear, fairly emotional, and hopefully rational way real people live their real lives. This X factor needs to become part of your website. But how?

The current trend is to move out of your website, live in the public space of social networks, and drive people back to your boring old apartment. What if we didn’t go back? What if we all stayed out here, in the sunshine, offering widgets of functionality that lived out here in the open? What is the open?

I think all will become function, and not form. The architects might scream, “ugliness!” but these new interconnected functions might mimic the natural world, not gardens, but jungles. And then over time we’ll probably clear cut them for farmland again (as Tac noted in his previous post, it’s exhausting to live in our always-disruptive arena). In the meantime, how do we both grow a jungle, manage it, and eventually transverse it, in the most productive way?

What do you think?

None Found

The social media earthquake hit and it hit hard. It caused, and is still causing, massive disruption that can mostly be felt in the worlds of media and marketing. But the core of business – business as usual – hasn’t been hit yet. Not really.

It’s about to.

Tired and Lonely

The supports that hold up traditional organizations have been shaken and weakened and are about to be hit by a massive aftershock that will finish the job. Business as usual will cease to exist except in the most laggard, niche markets. Org charts will get thrown out the window and MBA programs everywhere will quickly turn into business history classes.

Anytime someone tells you “We HAVE  to do it this way,” run. Run far away. You don’t HAVE to do anything. If someone says “You Can’t do that, it will never work,” you’re probably on the right path, keep going.

While I am as excited as ever about these tectonic shifts happening in our world I’m also really tired.  I love disruption more than any healthy person should. I thrive in chaos. But I’ve been doing this for a while now and sometimes it’s exhausting, lonely work.

I feel like I’ve just sprinted as fast as I could to the finish line only to realize that it was actually the starting line to a marathon. Go.

Even though I’ve been right way more often than I’ve been wrong over the last 5 years, most people aren’t going to believe me. Even those that believed me the first time are going to be skeptical, and the ones who do believe me and aren’t skeptical are tired too. Some of them are sitting this one out.

But that’s enough complaining, it’s time to get back to work. I’ve got massive destruction to prepare for.

Join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page or follow the Twitter account.

Photo credit: by Balakov

Similar Posts:

• Managing Social Media Missunderstandings

# of Comments 0

• Entrepreneurs! Start Your Engines!

# of Comments 7

• Web 2.0, Venture Capital and Me

# of Comments 12

• Managing Social Media Missunderstandings
• Entrepreneurs! Start Your Engines!
• Web 2.0, Venture Capital and Me

Is there anything we are more passionate about than friends and family? I doubt it. Netfix is learning that right now. They recently killed the little used, but obviously much loved (for those who used it) Friends feature. This was a social feature on Netflix that allowed users to add friends and create lists of people that they could see what they were watching on Netflix.

Netflix gets algorithms. They don’t seem to get social. Their Friends feature had so much potential and if used right, and promoted and developed could probably drive just as much if not more video use than their famous recommendation engine. But they obviously don’t feel that way.

According to Netflix less than 2% of users used the feature that’s been around since 2004, but those 2% are upset. Apparently they killed the feature without warning those passionate users and have now issued an apology.

Killing product features is tough, not communicating the changes in advance is not the advised route. But I’d like to look at the apology. Todd Yellin (appropriate last name right now) issued an apology on the company blog, they admitted their mistakes, explained the rationale, apologized and mentioned that they have read every comment, blog post & tweet.

My real question is if they are engaging or not. Netflix is great at listening and only mildly good at engaging. Of the 121 comments so far Netflix hasn’t continued engaging. There’s some really upset customers and I imagine that some additional transparency would help.They have a Facebook page, a Ning community but their Twitter account seems to have a squatter on it, or they’re just not doing anything with it.

So basically Netflix is like most companies right now; they have a social footprint but its obviously not ingrained into their culture or processes yet. This is the next step for everyone.

Photo credit: by Balakov

None Found

I have a bad feeling about this

The GeoWars were in full frontal attack this week at SXSW. While the main battle was being fought between Foursquare and hometown favorite, Gowalla there were dozens of other location based services hoping to get some attention. I have said several times that there is no “offline” or “online” there just is. This is becoming even more apparent as geolocation heats up.

Twitter itself kept prompting me all week to enable my location on posts and we know that Facebook will soon be adding geolocation data to their status updates. But something you may not realize is that even if you opt out of Twitters location feature your location can still be identified.

I’m going to repeat that for the people just scanning the post:

Even if you opt out of location based features your location can still be identified!

Lego Star Wars meets Dr Who

Forthcoming tools like Recognizr make it impossible to hide who you are from the Web now a new set of tools make it so you can’t hide where you are from the Web. And actually hiding from the Web seems outdated. It’s more like the fourth dimension or the Matrix.

The main reason for this is because of the rise of mobile. Even without mobile, IP addresses are easily enough identified but mobile has many more ways. Anytime you post on your phone the location of  your updated can be tracked by GPS, by triangulating your location based on cell towers, plus every picture you take on smartphones has geolocation data embedded in the code. That’s why people can do cool Flickr map mashups.

I saw two services this week that demonstrated how it’s impossible to hide in this new matrixed world we live in.

Tweetsii – Is available for the iPhone only and besides being a full Twitter client also pulls in data from Foursquare and Gowalla. From their own site:

Tweetsii connects people and places across networks. Tweetsii is breaking the wall between the real world and the digital world, where power of the Internet is in real time to have more fun, meet more people, and do more cool stuff…

Stalqer: Is also available for the iPhone only but goes a step further by achieving an “always on” in the background state by setting up an email address on your phone. This provides for a lot more functionality. From TechCrunch:

In addition to background functionality, Stalqer lets you import your Facebook friends, via Facebook Connect, to the app. If your friends have made their general location public via Facebook, The app then syncs your friends with your iPhone contacts and will then show you where your friends are. So, Stalqer will basically pull any public information about your friend (i.e. what city they live in) and show where the friends is on your application, if if they haven’t downloaded the app. At the moment, you cannot see anyone on Stalqer who is not your friend on Facebook.

Don't upset a Wookie

These location based services are being driven by marketers. In our quest for better marketing data are we becoming too reckless? At SXSW danah boyd presented on the dangers of marketers assuming that data should be public by default and private when necessary. The general public is not aware of the potential ramifications, or even how public and identifiable their data is. And to be honest I don’t think anyone understands the full ramifications. We need to tread lightly, if for no other reason that we’re about to scare the general public really bad. I don’t think having our data open puts in anymore risk than we were before, but I could easily be wrong.

My advise to clients is to be very careful here. Treat marketing with location data like approaching a wild animal. Make lots of noise, make sure they know what you’re doing and have respect. Because when the public gets scared by this, they will rip someones face off.

Join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page or follow the Twitter account.

Photo 1: by Don Solo
Photo 2: by icedsoul photography .:teymur madjderey
Photo 3: by Balakov

None Found

The Internet of things is the one of the next big side effects of our always on, always mobile lifestyles. McKinsey recently released a report on the implications of the Internet of things. I saw this coming to life this weekend.

At SXSW everyone was given a little packet of stickers. Actually everyone was given a lot of stickers. There was also a proliferation of QR codes (they were a sponsor) and Microsoft TAG codes (TAG is a client). But the previously mentioned pack of stickers were filled with little barcodes.

If you own an iPhone you can download the stickybits iPhone app, scan the barcode and add “content” like pics, vids, text or audio and send that sticker to someone. If they have the stickybits app they can scan the barcode and see all that content you associated with the code.

Anyone who’s familiar with QR and TAG codes is thinking, so what, they can do that too in various types of ways.

BUT (here’s the kicker) you can scan and associate content to ANY barcode. Like all those barcodes on all the shelves in all the stores all over the World.

There’s a lot of cool things people could do with this. Leave favorite recipes, or shopping trips. But there’s another side. Maybe I’ve just been hanging around PR people too long but I see more fragmentation of communication that brands have to be a little worried about.

Many of you are familiar with Google Sidewiki, the Google Toolbar extension that lets you add notes to the side of any Web page on the Internet. This concept, and all the potential nightmares that came with it, may sound familiar.

Stickybits is a new product so not many people would ever see the content you associate with a barcode (yet). But what if it did take off? Imagine being a product manager at Product & Gamble and trying to monitor all those conversations across all your products.

• Wearing your Stickybit on your sleeve, or elsewhere (news.cnet.com)
• The Secret Lives Of Objects: StickyBits Turn Barcodes Into Personal Message Boards (techcrunch.com)

Similar Posts:

• Google Reader Notes helps FriendFeed hurts del.icio.us and Twitter

# of Comments 3

• Why it takes me so long to add Twitter Friends

# of Comments 2

• Twitter Craze Feels Like MySpace Back in the Day

# of Comments 3

• Google Reader Notes helps FriendFeed hurts del.icio.us and Twitter
• Why it takes me so long to add Twitter Friends
• Twitter Craze Feels Like MySpace Back in the Day

SXSW Rocks!

It’s Sunday evening, halfway point through a jam packed SXSW. I wanted to do a quick post between events with a few notes that either, individually don’t make a full post or I’m working on a longer one.

Events/Parties

Unlike most parties where everyone shows up fashionably late, everyone at SXSW shows up early to get as much in as possible.

• The Hive Awards were much more entertaining than I thought (and I already had high expectations).
• The Diggnation event was crazy cool. Wow.
• Bryan person and crew nailed it with the Social Media Breakfast Mega Meetup.
• John Hagel’s book launch party and the Powered dinner were perfect because they were more intimate.
• I’m off to the PBS/RWW party now. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The People

While the parties have been amazing, thy’re not the highlight for me. I know it’s why so many people want to come here but for me the parties were just a convenient meeting place (probably because I don’t drink, so half way through when everyone else is getting their party on, I’m getting a little bored).

Best part hands down about SXSW has been meeting people I have known online, in some cases, as long as 2 or 3 years, and have never met in real life or people I haven’t seen for as long or longer. You all are great, I’m so glad I got to finally meet so many of you and I’m really sorry I didn’t get to meet more of you. I’m going to have to radically update my People to Meet Twitter list.

In fact I keep running into so many of you in the halls that I haven’t made it to very many sessions (but from what I’ve heard I haven’t missed too much).

The Sessions

The two best and most applicable sessions were the Social Business Summit (technically not a SXSW session but whatever) and Gaming the System with 4Chan. You may not realize the inherent irony in these two statements. The SBS was filled with speakers who are accomplished authors, entrepreneur CEO’s, Ivy League graduates and the best business strategists in this space. 4Chan (Wikipedia link because I don’t want to send you to the site) is the bridge the trolls of the Internet live under.  I that’s all very cryptic but I’m working on a much longer post.

Coming Posts

Other posts I’m working on (these are just working titles):

• What Social Businesses can learn from 4Chan
• Crowdsourcing Heats Up
• The Victims Caught in the Crossfire of Geolocation Wars
• The 3 Types of Social Media Strategy

And I’m only half way through the event.

What did I do right?

This was my first year so I wasn’t totally sure what to expect but here’s what I did right.

• Wing it: I made almost no plans for sessions to attend knowing that my priority was to meet people.
• Power Packing: I brought my own power strip, an extra battery for my netbook and power cords for my phones
• Pack light: This is not a fashion show. Leave the suit at home and pack only the necessities.
• Staying the whole week: It was rough to get Wed-Wed off but so worth it. I would have hated to be rushed and leave early. I still have so many people to meet and some sessions I really want to attend.

What would I do differently next time?

• Bring more business cards (although I still wouldn’t give many out)
• Bring my skateboard (for commuting purposes of course)
• Book my hotel sooner. I’m a little out of town and have to drive in and parking is painful.
• Plan more: While I’m glad I didn’t do a detailed plan I do wish I had planned a little bit better. The sessions were spread out between 3 building and I didn’t realize that I’d have to try and run from one building to another for sessions (remember running to class in college). This usually left me wondering around the convention center looking for a room that was in a different hotel. Of course that’s probably why I ended up meeting so many people.
• Take more pictures and videos. I forgot my camera and at parties the camera phone doesn’t cut it. I also wish I’d interviewed all the great people I met.

Look for a Part 2 on Wednesday.

Photo via Balakov

None Found

On the WE Studio D, Thinkers & Doers blog this last week we posted the three part Zombie Media Trilogy. When we talk to companies we see a much bigger problem with social media adoption than just how do we get a blog, Facebook page or Twitter account started. The bigger problem is that no one seems to be looking at the much bigger problem of how do you truly create a scalable system to get the most out of social media. This is the first part in our effort to help people understand the larger problem.

Here are some highlights from each post. Click through to check out the complete posts. Let me know what you think.

The Coming Wave of Social Media Zombies

Now that companies are starting to show results with social media, the rest of the early majority and late majority adopters are going to continue to pile on. They’re going to try and strap on social media to their existing efforts and realize that they can’t sustain these efforts. Worse yet, they’ll launch these efforts with no thought to what to do with their new fans, friends and followers (assuming they get any to begin with).

The Top 10 Social Media Books You Have to Read if You Are a Zombie

# Naked Conversations About Zombies – How zombies are changing the way businesses talk with customers.
# The Zombie Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by zombie technologies.
# Zombies Engage – The complete guide for zombies to build, cultivate and measure success on the Web. Foreword by Zombie Kutcher.

Social Media vs. Zombie Media

What does zombie media look like? Empty, vacuous Facebook pages and Twitter accounts devoid of conversation. [Warning] Zombie accounts often have lots of content flowing through them, but no one is there. It’s brainless.

Is zombie media the same as social media spam? No. Unlike most social media marketing, social media spam has a deliberate strategy and better ROI.

:Screenshot: timeinc.net

Similar Posts:

• Managements Misguided Social Media Efforts

# of Comments 2

• Death to Social Media and their Experts!!

# of Comments 8

• Chasing Your Customers vs Chasing Your Competitors

# of Comments 0

• Managements Misguided Social Media Efforts
• Death to Social Media and their Experts!!
• Chasing Your Customers vs Chasing Your Competitors

Last month I gave Yammer (a product I like) a hard time because it doesn’t integrate with microblogging clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck and I feel that their pricing is prohibitive to large, enterprise companies.

I got several comments from people and had some really good discussions around the use of Yammer and the good and bad people face with the product. To my surprise the most engaged commenter was David Sacks, Founder and CEO of both Yammer and Geni, was previously the COO of Paypal and if that wasn’t enough, producer of the movie Thank You For Not Smoking.

I’ve been meaning to, to do a follow up post on what Yammer decided to launch instead of the features I thought they should have implemented but yesterdays Social Business Summit provided the perfect fodder I needed.

Lane Becker, CEO of Get Satisfaction, made the comment that we need to create more edges in our companies. Edges are where the cool things happen, it’s where conversations with partners and customers happen; it’s where innovation occurs.

John Hagel then later made the comment that companies need to move from knowledge stocks (proprietary IP that they milk dry) to knowledge flows (rich interactions and collaborations with stakeholders).

Earlier this month Yammer released Yammer Communities a tool that can do just that.  From the Yammer blog:

This new product feature enables companies and organizations to create a new type of Yammer network that is not restricted to a common email domain.  Yammer Communities provide companies with a secure, private, and separate space to communicate with their external business contacts.

This is an excellent move for Yammer. Traditional “partner portals” or “extranets” are secure, intranet like sites where companies can share things like documents and announcements with partners and over the years extranets have grown to include some level of collaboration. Most extranets suck for two reasons:

• They’re hard to use have horrible UX
• People don’t want one more place they have to remember to check

I have no doubt Yammer will destroy current extranets on both accounts. However I still think that being able to access Yammer from an aggregated application like Tweetdeck or Seesmic will make the service much easier to use. But David is a successful serial entrepreneur, the one category of business person I have the most respect for, obviously knows what he’s doing and shouldn’t be listening to every blogger with an opinion and an overinflated sense of importance.

I’m looking forward to giving the new communities feature a test to see how well it works.

It’s pretty long (just under 30 minutes) but if you’re interested here’s an interview Robert Scoble recently did with David.

I chat with the CEO of microblogging and corporate social service leader, Yammer, about what they are doing and how the enterprise market is becoming hyper competitive with companies like Salesforce, Jive, Socialtext, SocialContext, Google, and Zoho all angling for the market that Yammer was first in.

Internal social media is about to go through the growth external social media went through for the last few years. It’s going to be exciting to watch.

None Found

I had an amazing day at the Dachis Social Business Summit. I have so much to write about it might take me a few weeks to catch up. Especially after surprise guest John Hagel presented. That was the most insightful 15 minutes I’ve heard in a long time.

I’ve been thinking out loud on this blog about what the future of the marketing org will look like inside companies.This has lead me to wonder about the total reconstruction of corporate organization. I’ve researched a lot of different models but there is one area I never looked to: The Middle Ages.

Douglas Rushkoff, who I wasn’t familiar with but if I was a normal PR/Marketing person I probably would have been, as he is an award winning writer, documentary film maker, media critic and accomplished author. He recently published a new book called Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Amazon Link) which we got for free at the summit (see disclosures at the bottom of the post for full FTC disclosure).

Doug, Dachis’ own Lee Bryant and several others referenced the pre-twentieth century corporate driven economies of Western Europe. While this may sound like heresy to many of us American capitalists their point was that we are moving back to a relationship driven economy.  One common theme was that we have entered a time where relationships matter. The network is no longer roads or servers, the network is us and we are people who connect with people.

Our current business climate functions the way it does because in order to achieve scale we have to give up intimacy. The twentieth century belief was that you couldn’t have both. The Internet, in theory, gave us both scale and intimacy but social media has fully delivered on that promise.

What was surprisingly absent from the summit was talk of technology. There was some, but just used mostly as examples not recommendations or even suggestions. The general agreement was that our current technology will look nothing like our future technology, but more important than that was that the technology, while enabling, doesn’t matter. Our current processes, value propositions and especially the way we communicate is about to devolve back to the Middle Ages.

Join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page or follow the Twitter account.

Photo credit via kennymatic

FTC Disclosure Icons via Louis Gray

Similar Posts:

• Managing Social Media Missunderstandings

# of Comments 0

• 2.0 Thinking

# of Comments 6

• Web 2.0 Has a Higher Return on Total Investment

# of Comments 11

• Managing Social Media Missunderstandings
• 2.0 Thinking
• Web 2.0 Has a Higher Return on Total Investment

I’m at the Dachis Social Business Summit here in Austin right before SXSW kicks off. Like all conferences they’ve established a hashtag #sbs2010. While trying to follow along with the rest of my attendees, to see who’s here and what’s resonating with them and I got this message

Possibly the most disruptive technology in social media was when Twitter acquired Summize which later became Twitter search and they’re limiting it at probably the biggest geek event of the year, SXSW, the very even that launched  Twitter several years ago. And the SXSW Interactive hasn’t even started yet.

Could you imagine if Bing limited search right now as they’re trying to compete with Google? Twitter is the little train that could and is competing/with partnering against/with, Google, Bing and Facebook.

I couldn’t think of a worse move. AT&T knows SXSW is going to be huge and they’re beefing up coverage just for the event.Similar Posts:

• Google Reader Notes helps FriendFeed hurts del.icio.us and Twitter

# of Comments 3

• Twitter Craze Feels Like MySpace Back in the Day

# of Comments 3

• Ask, and TweetDeck Giveth

# of Comments 3

• Google Reader Notes helps FriendFeed hurts del.icio.us and Twitter
• Twitter Craze Feels Like MySpace Back in the Day
• Ask, and TweetDeck Giveth